IT student develops app to bring Koronadal’s heritage to life
By Saghir Hussain ·
A 20-year-old student in South Cotabato has just shown Silicon Valley how heritage tech should actually work — no venture capital, no hype cycle, just code that matters.
Charles Luke Templonuevo built KoroAR as his thesis at Notre Dame of Marbel University. Point your phone at a landmark in Koronadal and the past overlays the present: stories, photos, context you'd never get from a plaque. It's augmented reality with a purpose — preserving Indigenous and colonial history before developers bulldoze it for another mall.
Here's why this ripples beyond Mindanao. UNESCO estimates we lose a language every two weeks. Physical heritage vanishes faster. The usual Western solution? Digitise it, stick it on a server in Virginia, call it "democratised access." Templonuevo did different. He built for his neighbours first — offline-capable, Tagalog and Hiligaynon interfaces, designed for the phones people actually own.
That's the model. Not Meta's Horizon Worlds. Not Apple's Vision Pro demos in Cupertino boardrooms. A kid in a Philippine state university proving AR can serve memory, not just marketing.
Manila should fund this. ASEAN should replicate it. And every tech incubator from Shoreditch to Singapore should ask: are we building for quarterly returns, or for the stories that hold communities together?
Because if the next generation of Koronadal kids grows up knowing their history through a free app on a ₱5,000 phone, that's not just innovation. That's resistance.